abUSed: The Postville Raid (abUSAdos: La Redada de Postville)

It is at once an epic story of survival, hope, and humble aspirations, of triumph, defeat, and rebirth. The face of immigration is revealed through the gripping personal stories of the individuals, the families, and the town that survived the most brutal, most expensive, and the largest immigration raid in the history of the United States.

It is at once an epic story of survival, hope, and humble aspirations, of triumph, defeat, and rebirth.
The face of immigration is revealed through the gripping personal stories of the individuals, the families, and the town that survived the most brutal,
most expensive, and the largest immigration raid in the history of the United States.

The first internationally acclaimed, award-winning film produced entirely in Guatemala tells the politically-charged coming-of-age story of a young boy striving to follow his dreams while his country struggles to preserve democracy amidst CIA cold-war propaganda.

This documentary depicts the disastrous consequences of "Dumping": From poisoned workers, contaminated crops and water supplies, decimation of wildlife,
and the development of pesticide-resistant insects. Not to mention the boomerang effect when contaminated foreign goods, from coffee to beef and cotton, are imported into the U.S.

This film is based on Fernando Arrabal's play by the same name and interweaves characters and plot lines from The Labyrinth and The Automovile Graveyard, another two plays by Arrabal, The Trycicle. The film is full of absurd dialogues, desperate situations, and -like the train which begins and ends the film- unstopable in its clear presentation of the clash between poetry and money, the rules of society and the freedom of the individual, the fight to the death between the adult and the child we alll have inside.

An experimental short film, made specifically to be submitted to the Ann Arbor Film Festival depicting a life drawing class where the model is dressed and the students are naked. This is Luis Argueta's first black and white, 16mm film. It includes an elaborate sound design by Joe Pearson. The title is a fake apology.

Guatemala 1976: A metaphor of natural devastation and political violence. Amidst the earthquake-shattered walls of my home, a young child drinks the blood of a turkey as the sound of a manual typewriter is drowned by machine gun fire.

Filmed in 1973 with camera Canon 814 de Super 8 film, "The Squirrell", is Luis Argueta's very first film. "I operated the camera and edited the film. There was no script and the plot was constructed along the way. I knew close to nothing about filmmaking but the process was intuitive and most entertaining," says Argueta.